Crazy times, these. MTV's Kurt Loder has become the voice of the establishment. Chuck D's manager, Walter Leaphart, is defending file-sharing on CNN. Metallica attorney Howard King is even feistier than usual, and Napster's Shawn Fanning is getting more face-time on the tube than the entire cast of "Road Rules."
In the wake of last week's injunction against Napster, which has since been stayed by a three-judge federal appeals court, the debate over file-sharing has become front-page news. Which means we've been treated to the heretofore unusual sight of digital-music types strutting their stuff on television, trying to get their point of view across in neat sound bites while giving the public a crash course on the issues at hand. If any publicity is good publicity, the Fatboy Slims at Napster are sitting pretty right about now.
On Friday, CNN's "Talkback Live" was titled, "Napster: Can Trading Music Over the Internet be Stopped?" (The answer is probably not, but that would make for a mighty short program.) Guest host Daryn Kagan ran it as breathlessly as an asthmatic without an inhaler. First, he lobbed a softball to Metallica lawyer Howard King, saying: "Right now, it looks like you've won the battle." King, with apparent prescience (at that point the injunction hadn't been stayed), demurred. "I don't think we've won the battle," he said. Then he lapsed into legalese with, "The people who are responsible for creative activity have just had validation of their rights to profit from that activity."
Leaphart, who is president of Rapstation.com in addition to managing Chuck D, didn't let an opportunity to plug his Web site get by, calling it a "superstation, similar on a smaller scale to what CNN does." (Um, a much smaller scale.) Hilarity ensued when King asked Leaphart if there was any music by Dr. Dre (another of King's clients) on the site. "What, are you going to try to sue me?" asked Leaphart. A flustered King didn't respond directly, but did say, oddly, that he had no problem with the tools that Rapstation.com offers users looking for file-sharing software.
When asked to comment on Judge Patel's ruling and whether this was new legal territory, King assured viewers that there are laws on the books protecting those who "create works and obtain a copyright, (giving them) the sole right to exploit those." He stated that "there's laws on the books. This is not a made-up law."
Meanwhile, MTV News correspondent Kurt Loder showed that he might be falling out of touch with his viewer demographic. While "Napster is a brilliant piece of software writing," it's nonetheless clearly based on theft, he concluded. "I don't think any technology, no matter how new, could supersede the moral basis of law." The laborious-use-of-metaphor prize goes to Leaphart, who said, "The bottom line is the genie is out of the bottle, the bottle is broke on the ground in a million pieces and crazy glue is not going to fix it."
Speaking of MTV, Napster's Shawn Fanning sat down with VJ Chris Connelly the day after Patel ruled against his company, wearing, of course, his trademark baseball cap. Connelly began his hard-hitting interview by asking whether Fanning had gotten any sleep and what he thought about while he was lying in bed. (News flash! He didn't sleep well! Stop the presses! He thought about the court case!)
Connelly continued by asking if it "felt like a real personal hurt on some level." Fanning doesn't take it personally (thank God), but he did say that he thinks that Napster users are "the ones being attacked." On the whole, Fanning did a respectable job in the camera's glare, concluding the interview by saying that "file-sharing is kind of what the Internet was created to do ... Napster itself is sort of based on many existing technologies ... it's obviously something that people really like. It's something that will continue to exist."
For complete Napster coverage, see The Standard.
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